Voices: Seeing the light on conservation

I just bought a “new to me” car and had the chance to take it on a trip down the Thruway to Albany. I thought it would be a great chance to check out the highway mileage.

Stephen Uebbing

I just bought a “new to me” car and had the chance to take it on a trip down the Thruway to Albany. I thought it would be a great chance to check out the highway mileage.

Now, although the car is rated at 29 mpg highway, it never actually hit that number. For the first part of my trip I kept the speed control at 65 mph and got 30.3 mpg. Of course, everyone was passing me, so I sped up to keep up with traffic and got 28 mpg. Interesting, I thought. What would happen if I turned back the clock to 1978 when the national speed limit was 55 mph? Some of us remember that during the Arab oil embargo, the federal government reduced the speed on interstate highways to 55 mph to save fuel. When I gave it a try, my new to me car, with a 3.9L engine, got more than 36 mpg! I was astonished.

Then, of course there is the issue of safety. When we were all going slower, we not only saved gasoline; we were, one would assume, safer on the highway.

These days there are other reasons to conserve fuel. Global warming is one. The less we burn, the better the chance for Planet Earth. Security is another. Oil is the main economic driver of Middle East terrorism. In the war on terrorism, both sides are funded by the same people ... our soldiers are funded by our taxpayers, the terrorists by petro dollars — coming in large part from us, American drivers. Without their exported oil, Iran may not have the finances necessary to become a nuclear threat. So, using less oil is more important than ever.

But conserving energy on our highways is not our national strategy. Congress has refused to require higher average fuel economy from the automobile industry, and no politician interested in being reelected would suggest we lower the speed limit. Instead, our strategy is to make days longer ... perhaps at the risk of our children.

Any parent with kids that drive knows the feeling of dread when teens are behind the wheel when it is dark. Regardless of how responsible the young person is, he or she is still an inexperienced driver on the road without the benefit of sunlight, whether before dawn or after sunset.

When I was a school superintendent, I could not wait for Daylight Saving Time to end. It’s not that I liked it getting dark at 5 p.m. as much as I liked it being light at 6:45 a.m. As Daylight Saving Time winds down, more and more of our students are driving to school or waiting for their bus in the dark. This year, daylight saving will end on Nov. 4, eight full days later than in 2003 due to the fact that the federal government extended the period of Daylight Saving Time, ostensibly to save energy. This week, there will be elementary school children waiting for buses in the near dark.

I do indeed believe that conservation is in the best interests of our nation and our planet, and apparently increasing Daylight Saving Time may help do that. But saving energy at the expense of safety for school kids does not seem like a reasonable trade-off. Besides, if we were really interested in saving energy AND increasing safety, maybe it is time to revisit the ideas that came about during oil embargo of the 1970s. That would mean we would have to sacrifice something, like driving 65 mph on the interstate — now there’s a thought.

Canandaigua resident Stephen Uebbing is a professor of Educational Leadership at the Warner Graduate School of Education at the University of Rochester and was a school superintendent in this region from 1988 to 2006.

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